Alicia Spencer-Hall
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aspencerhall.bsky.social
Alicia Spencer-Hall
@aspencerhall.bsky.social
3.5K followers 1.9K following 6K posts
Writer. Researcher. Editor. Genderqueer femme. Crip. She/they.

// medieval lit / media / gender / disability / pop culture //

https://linktr.ee/aspencerhall
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aspencerhall.bsky.social
The paperback of Medieval Twitter has landed omfg

Not quite a stocking stuffer price, but much much more affordable than before, thankfully

www.arc-humanities.org/978180270265...

#MedievalSky 🗃️ @archumanities.bsky.social
Paperback 9781802702651 Published: 2025-11-01 $34.95 North America £29.95 Rest of World
November 5, 2025 at 11:51 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Time to channel Kate Nash instead spotify.link/iO9rlSQ3SXb
Lyrics from "My Bile" by Kate Nash: Everything, everything that I thought I had to be Everyone, every person I thought I had to please I'm leaving at the door, I don't wanna be like that anymore cause I've already explained, I've already argued I don't have to be there, I don't have to tell you I don't have to listen, I don't have to understand My bile is all I have to give No smile, well take a picture It will last much longer than this
October 30, 2025 at 12:30 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Florence lowkey voicing a manifesto for doing the research that needs doing, the stuff that matters. The institutions are crumbling. There are no jobs. Playing it safe isn't worth it & isn't even effective any more in getting to the glory land of job security

spotify.link/MMr5UaF2SXb
Lyrics from "Sympathy Magic" by Florence + The Machine: I do not find worthiness in virtue I no longer try to be good It didn't keep me safe Like you told me that it would
October 30, 2025 at 12:16 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
... & the way that the precaritization of the academy leads to disabling of more & more scholars

[from www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi..., pp. 100-01]
Academics simply must find time to research. Our survival depends on it. But time is not a resource to which everyone has equal access, nor is energy. Every- thing takes more time—and correspondingly more energy—when you are dis- abled, and fatigue is an exceptionally common component of chronic illness. Being in pain all the time is exhausting. Living with disability is a second shift from which disabled scholars cannot ever clock off. We don’t necessarily have enough time, or energy, to attend to our “scheduled” work hours, let alone put in any more hours at a moment’s notice. As Susan Wendell points out, making in- creases in pace obligatory for workers actively disables ever more of the affected workforce: if “the pace of life increases without changes in other factors, more people become disabled simply because fewer people can keep up with the ‘nor- mal’ pace.”127 Scores of testimonies about the increasing ill health—mental and physical—of notionally able-bodied scholars due to the ever-increasing demands of their jobs bear witness to this phenomenon affecting today’s academic work- force.128 Early-career scholars are hit particularly hard, given the integral instabil- ity of their (under)employment.129 A quarter (24.6%) of precarious academics sur- veyed by the University and College Union in 2019 classified their experience as “extremely stressful,” with more than two-thirds of respondents (68.4%) disclos- ing high levels of stress. No wonder, then, that the vast majority (71%) of respond- ents reported that their “mental health had been affected by the stress and anxi- ety of working on an insecure contract,” and a significant minority (43%) testified that such stress “had affected their physical health.”130
October 24, 2025 at 3:23 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
This also feels relevant, echoing @beccamerkelbach.bsky.social's piece, on the way in which precarity on an individual and systemic level leads to the loss of diverse scholarly voices...

[from www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi..., pp. 97-98]
No matter how long a scholar works—even pulling twelve-hour days, Mon- day to Sunday—they are never productive enough. In a 2019 study commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, for example, two-thirds (67%) of full-time researchers on permanent and fixed-term contracts reported working more than forty hours per week, with one-third (32%) working over fifty hours per week.113 Being normal or average and working, say, thirty or forty hours a week, is no longer enough And it certainly is not enough for those of us without permanent positions, with all the instability and financial hardship that entails, who must work harder than any- one to “prove” themselves worthy of a “real” job, alongside working all hours sim- ply to earn enough to survive. This means the reality, or so it seems—and feels—to many of us is, in the words of one casualized lecturer sharing his fears, that “the only ones who get permanent academic jobs are those able to tough out several years of fraught, unstable work.”115 Not everyone can “tough [it] out” for long, if at all. The people who are able to are those “with considerable financial privileges, without caring responsibilities, without financial dependents and those mentally resilient enough to cope.”116 With integral politics of exclusion, the praxes of pre- carity are not just ableist but also discriminatory along intersectional lines.117 They are a catalyst for the wholesale loss of “non-normative” scholars—read: not cisgen- der, heterosexual, middle- or upper-class, non-disabled, white men without care re- sponsibilities—from the Academy
October 24, 2025 at 3:23 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Uuuuuuuuuuuugh
October 24, 2025 at 1:57 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Get yours here
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
Higher Education is a rich and diverse environment which allows so many different types of people and disciplines to flourish. Medieval Studies is a particular confluence of this, with the meeting of history, literature, history of art, archaeology, and more. The contributors describe their lived experience of disability and how this intersects with the discipline of Medieval Studies, embracing both the challenges and the joy this can bring. They discuss teaching, research, and just existing within the university, bringing in theoretical approaches as well as linking to medieval texts. Towards an Accessible Academy provides a unique perspective on the state of accessibility within this field and in the university environment more broadly.　 This volume sits between work which centers the experience of disabled academics and which provides guidance for supporting disabled students. While providing real-life testimonies of disability in the academy, many chapters also include practical advice on best practice in supporting disabled scholars and students, as well as how the authors feel connected to the medieval sources we study.　 The book is also a call to action for all of its readers to actively practise allyship, providing clear examples of how we might all implement the advice given by contributors to improve the accessibility of our academy.
October 20, 2025 at 11:57 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Hello friend!!
A white hand holds a hardback book, Towards an Accessible Academy, edited by Alexandra R. A. Lee, Hope Doherty-Harrison and E. R. P. Champion
October 20, 2025 at 11:54 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
The perfect genderqueer shirt doesn't exi--
An oversized cotton button-down shirt. The upper portion features a classic shirting panel in pale blue, while the lower half shifts into a playful polka dot print for visual contrast. Diagonally placed floral sequin embellishments sweep across the front forming the border between the two fabrics
October 10, 2025 at 7:50 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Probably the most personal thing I've ever written, about living in crip time, about precarity, and how crip scholars grinding in precarity are further marginalized by academia's timezones (and rhetoric of timeliness)

#MedievalSky #CripSky #DisabilitySky

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
Alicia Spencer-Hall Chapter 5 Stopping the Clock(s): Precarious Times in the AcademyKeywords: bereavement, crip time, Douceline of Digne, precarity, medieval hagi-ography, temporalityI don’t remember what time it was when I got the news. It was a bad time, though, I remember that sure enough. I was elbow-deep in writing a chapter for an edited collection, steeling myself for one final push to bring my scholarly baby into the world.1The deadline was tight—it’s always tight—but I could make it, if I could just keep going. I was tired and I hurt; I had slogged away for long hours this past week or so of writing. I had shifted time usually reserved for self- care—for having breaks, eating lunch, taking exercise—into the work column of my schedule. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. I was writing a chap-ter on chronic pain and illness in the Middle Ages, underscoring the political ur-gency of recognizing ourselves, as members of the crip community, in historical
October 6, 2025 at 1:02 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
October 1, 2025 at 8:25 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
October 1, 2025 at 8:10 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Paperback of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects is apparently on sale #MedievalSky

www.routledge.com/Trans-and-Ge...
Screenshot of book listing on publisher's website, on sale for £30.39
October 1, 2025 at 4:18 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
See also: the disproportionate amount of women employed on precarious & zero-hour contracts in academia

(From p. 92 of www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...)
Intersectionality is key to the analysis here. Financial marginalization is lev- ied along intersectional axes of identity, reflected not just in the disability pay gap, but in gender and race pay gaps too. In 2020–2021, for instance, the median gender pay gap in HE in the UK was 8.5 percent, while the median ethnicity pay gap stood at 2.7 percent.89 Disabled men academics earned more than disabled women academics, with a median pay gap of 8.5 percent.90 Such inequities are likewise reflected in disproportionate rates of casualization. Women, for example, are more likely than men to be employed on all forms of insecure contracts, and are twice as likely than men to be employed on zero-hours contracts.91 At the same time, whiteness is a significantly protective factor against precarity.92 Aca- demics of color are more likely to be employed on fixed-term contracts than white colleagues.93 Asian women are most likely (44%) to be employed on fixed- term contracts, while Black women are most likely (20%) to be employed on an hourly paid basis.94 By comparison, white men are least likely to be employed on both fixed-term (28%) and hourly-paid (12%) contracts. Data is not available on the collective impact of an academic’s gender, race, and disability on their casual- ized status. Nevertheless, it is self-evident that the intersections of gender and race shape disabled academics’ experiences of precarity, with disabled women and disabled people of color subject to additional marginalization. This includes being disproportionally burdened with the uncompensated, and professionally unacknowledged, work of “fixing” the institution’s structural problems—sexism, racism, ableism, and more.
September 25, 2025 at 8:39 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Everything is the worst, I'm down with nursery plague & battling with an edit, but I found out that Medieval Twitter was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Lone Medievalist Prize for Scholarship and I am consciously, stubbornly leaning into the YAY

lonemedievalist.hcommons.org/lone-medieva...
Honorable Mention: Alicia Spencer-Hall, Medieval Twitter Alicia Spencer-Hall's book Medieval Twitter (Arc Humanities Press, 2024) show the ways in which Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques, and explore how the medievalist community used the platform, both as a means to build community and as a conduit for vital research.
September 15, 2025 at 12:27 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Yup

www.arc-humanities.org/978194240195... pp. 168-69
Musk sacrificed Twitter to render unto the people X, a platform that aims to foster the white-supremacist fantasy of a white Middle Ages in which the cis-hetero-patriarchy reigned supreme. At the same time, Twitter—or what it represents in the right-wing imagination, the unacceptable divergence from cis-heterosexual whiteness—is stuffed down a decidedly medieval memory hole. If first there was the (analogue) Age of Antiquity, devoid of social media, Twitter’s time becomes the Middle Ages, that messy bit in between which must be overcome to show how truly modern we are. Twitter’s medieval, like the medieval evoked in Pulp Fiction, is “the space of the rejects—really, the abjects—of this world.”64 Musk’s X becomes a teleological inevitability and, indeed, a necessary step forward into right-wing “enlightenment.” But the medieval, it seeps. The platform formerly known as Twitter has proven to be a particularly porous medium.
September 8, 2025 at 12:34 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Cannot wait to read @parkerchronicle.bsky.social's new book, "Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature"

👉 Open Access here press.umich.edu/Books/L/Ligh...

#MedievalSky #CripSky
Front cover of Leah Pope Parker's "Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature", with a saint with a golden halo nestled within a beautiful gilded border on a pale manuscript background From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record. By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric’s saints’ lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability’s effects in literature. “Spiritual prosthesis” reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. “Systems of aberrance” emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant—including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies—form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology.
September 1, 2025 at 1:56 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
All study of the past, as Nicholas Watson remarks, has 'emotional designs on its object. Whatever the complexion of those emotions, they inevi-tably impact our methodological approaches and research findings. The academic's 'self-legimitating and claimed identity' of 'critical rationality, objectivity, and neutrality' is ineluctably compromised. We might not self-identify as 'fans' of the objects of our scholarship, eschewing the label of 'acafan' (plural: 'acafen'). Nevertheless, we engage in the creative intel-lectual practices that are the mainstay of fandom in almost every aspect of our scholarly work. 'Acafan' is not a derogatory label. Fans are, above all, 'acerbic critics' ('critiques acerbes') of the objects that capture their attention. With often surgical precision, they dissect texts to expose latent signification, and pry open textual fractures to uncover fresh inter-pretations. As Henry Jenkins explains, both academics and fans 'have a passion for thinking deeply and talking often about things they love. The output of such thinking and feeling, whether in the academy or in online fan communities, belongs to the 'fanon': 'the many stories, ideas, images, features, etc. that fans add or revise [to a given source text], usually outside of a commercial context. In this context, this book itself is explicitly fanonical. Spencer-Hall, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, pp. 190-91
August 6, 2025 at 8:17 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
This is not a drill!! @archumanities.bsky.social are doing me a solid & discounting Medieval Twitter to £57 💸💸😊

Get your urgent library purchase requests in now, friends

👇👇👇
www.arc-humanities.org/978194240195...

#MedievalSky #Skystorians #MedievalTwitter 🗃️
Medieval Twitter Modern Media, Literary Criticism, and Medievalism by Alicia Spencer-Hall October 2024 | Hardback Arc Impact £57
July 28, 2025 at 11:55 AM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
I think not
Email with subject line "Time to be perceived"
July 22, 2025 at 9:28 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
This is why we need more trans scholars, btw. We need the "trans anamorphosis" (Gutt, "Medieval Trans Lives") more than ever, to reestablish queer histories, reassert queer presence (& presents) and point to liberatory queer futures.

www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/d... p. 205
Trans readings are shaped by trans anamorphoses. But every reading is defined by the scope of its reader's experiences and understanding. By asserting the validity of trans readings we assert the validity of trans perspectives and the reality of trans existence. Identity entails seeing from a particular subject position, and an increased number of avail-able readings means an increased number of subject positions-or anamorphoses which are socially visible and legible. Furthermore, a change of perspective can be immensely productive for the analysis and understanding of the range of potential significations offered by a text. Thus, trans anamorphoses are not only relevant to transgender individuals, for whom they operate along pathways of recognition: by exposing the connections that other gazes have missed, these anamor-phoses serve, too, to open possibilities of discovery and comprehension for cisgender individuals. Anamorphoses which are not one's own, like the skull in Holbein's painting, indicate when glimpsed that there are other ways of seeing and understanding, and other meanings waiting to be discovered, only requiring an altered viewpoint. The perspectives and
July 17, 2025 at 9:33 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Well this project looks decidedly awesome

www.southampton.ac.uk/research/ins...
Centre for Music Education and Social Justice What Words do you Not Yet Have? Queer Musical Storytelling on Love, Life and the Law Non-academic host institution: SAYiT Academic Host Institution: University of Sheffield This project uses musical storytelling as a way to foster solidarity both within and beyond LGBTQ+ communities in Sheffield and Bradford, exploring how musical storytelling can build understanding, deepen community, and catalyse solidarity for social justice.
July 16, 2025 at 5:50 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Article on peer reviewing in science specifically, but key points all too relevant for humanities too

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

#MedievalSky
According to one recent study, in 2020 alone, academics globally spent more than 100 million hours peer reviewing papers for journals. For experts in the US, the time spent reviewing that year amounted to more than $1.5bn of free labour. According to a recent analysis, between 2015 and 2018, researchers globally paid more than $1bn in open access fees to the big five academic publishers, Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.
July 13, 2025 at 4:22 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
Stalker cam of late-night #IMC2025 bunnies because bunnies
July 9, 2025 at 3:27 PM
aspencerhall.bsky.social
(2/2)
Prof. David N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the College and Division of Humanities, The University of Chicago, editorial board member Film Theory in Media History Prof. Wanda Strauven, Adjunct Professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University, series editor Film Culture in Transition Prof. Dr. Annie van den Oever, Professor of Arts, Culture and Media Studies, University of Groningen / University of Johannesburg, series editor The Key Debates: Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies
July 9, 2025 at 1:51 PM